“They start at the wrong end of love. They begin at the climax. Can you wonder why it is so miserable?” — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
I meditated on love and reasoned it out. I realized what is wrong with us. Men fall in love for the first time. And what do they fall in love with? ...They fall in love with a woman. They start… — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
“Because things accumulate around your name," said Berenice. "You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have meaning. Things have accumulated around the name, if it is bad and you have a bad reputation, then you just can't jump out… — Carson McCullers Copy Share
It was like she was cheated. Only nobody had cheated her. So there was nobody to take it out on. However, just the same… — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
“Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet… — Carson McCullers Copy Share
“He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had left for a long… — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
Comparing the Brooklyn that I know with Manhattan is like comparing a comfortable and complacent duenna to her more brilliant and neurotic sister. — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
“Son, do you know how love should be begun?" The boy sat small and listening and still. Slowly he shook his head. The old… — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses. A seed grows in writing as in nature. The seed of the idea is developed by both labor… — Carson McCullers Copy Share
Now hoppin'-john was F. Jasmine's very favorite food. She had always warned them to wave a plate of rice and peas before her nose when she was in her coffin, to make certain there was no mistake; for if a breath of life was left in her, she would sit up and eat, but if she smelled the hopping-john, and… — Carson McCullers Copy Share
There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book. — Carson McCullers Copy Share Image
“Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them . . . She thought a long time and kept hitting her thighs with her fists. Her face fell like it was scattered in pieces and she could not keep it straight. The feeling was a whole lot… — Carson McCullers Copy Share
